On September 23, 2013, the Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic ruled that the children of “irregular” migrants born in the Dominican Republic after June 21st, 1929 would be stripped of their Dominican citizenship. The ruling – which could render 250,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent stateless – came as a result of a challenge by Juliana Deguis Pierre against the Dominican Electoral Board. The Electoral Board refused to issue Pierre an identification card. They argued that although she was born in the “national territory,” because she was the daughter of migrants in transit she did not have the right to Dominican citizenship. They based their ruling on article 11.1 of the Dominican Constitution of November 29, 1966 which held sway when Pierre was born.

While Ms. Pierre was the subject of the Constitutional Court’s ruling, it also targets all Dominicans of Haitian descent. The decision also formalizes a process of exclusion, racism, and harassment that had already construed Dominicans of Haitian descent as second-class citizens in their own country while marginalizing Haitian immigrants. Indeed, even before the ruling, Haitian immigrants had been subject to demeaning raids and dragnets by the Dominican security forces while in the past thirteen months, since August 16, 2012, almost 47,700 undocumented Haitians were expelled from the country – more than twice the figure of 20,541 expelled during the previous year.

Despite billions in aid which were supposed to go to the Haitian people, hundreds of thousands are still homeless, living in shanty tent camps as the effects from the earthquake of January 12, 2010 remain.

The earthquake devastated Haiti in January 2010 killing, according to Oxfam International, 250,000 people and injuring another 300,000. 360,000 Haitians are still displaced and living hand to mouth in 496 tent camps across the country according to the International Organization of Migration. Most eat only one meal a day.

“This mining plan will permanently strip the country of much of its mineral, cultural, and ecological wealth.”

Show me a corporate boss who calls Haiti the “poorest country in the western hemisphere,” and I’ll show you a con artist preparing to fleece Haiti. Likewise, show me a western technocrat who bemoans Haiti’s “dramatic deforestation due to charcoal production” and I’ll show a bio-pirate or vandal preparing to wreck Haiti’s remaining cloud-forest and mangrove-forest ecosystems.

It turns out that the real plan for Haiti’s northeastern region — especially the Caracol Bay area — is one that was hatched by Canadian mining corporations, with the U.S and South Korean sweatshop zone being a side project and distraction. If this mining plan is given a green light while Haiti is under foreign occupation, it will permanently strip the country of much of its mineral, cultural, and ecological wealth.

Last week, thousands of farmers and supporters of Haitian peasant agriculture marched for hours under the hot Caribbean sun to call for more government support for locally grown seeds and agriculture.

The demonstration was organized by the Peasant Movement of Papay and other farmer associations, human rights and women’s groups, and the Haitian Platform for Alternative Development (PAPDA), the Haitian online agency AlterPresse reported from the march. The official theme of the peaceful demonstration was “Land Grabbing is Endangering Agricultural Sovereignty.”

Singing slogans like “Long Live Haitian Agriculture!” and “Long live local seeds!” the crowd – wearing straw hats and red T-shirts – wound its way on foot, donkeys, and bikes through this dusty provincial capital. The demonstration ended at a square named for farmer Charlemagne Péralte, who lead the “Caco” peasant revolt against the U.S. army occupation from 1916 until 1919, when U.S. Marines assassinated him.

As if it were not enough that the United States repeatedly invaded Haiti, propped up dictators, overthrew the country’s first democratically elected president in 2004, and then appointed a government of gangsters, stole Haiti’s sovereignty to make her a protectorate of her worst enemies, then invaded the country again in 2010, under the guise of earthquake relief. After so many injuries to Haiti over so many years, the United States Agency for International Development now insults the living and the dead with a report that questions how many people died in the quake, and how many remain in camps for the displaced.

Haiti's infamous dictator "Baby Doc" Duvalier, returned to his country this week, while the country's first elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is kept out. These two facts really say everything about Washington's policy toward Haiti and our government's respect for democracy in that country and in the region.

Asked about the return of Duvalier, who had thousands tortured and murdered under his dictatorship, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said, "this is a matter for the Government of Haiti and the people of Haiti."

Caribbean: A year after the earthquake in Haiti - the help that hindersTuesday, January 11 @ 19:16:19 UTC

By Peter Hallward
January 11, 2011

Writer Peter Hallward spoke to Sadie Robinson about how the West has used last year’s earthquake as an opportunity to impose more control.

One year on from the devastating earthquake, much of Haiti remains in ruins. Life for ordinary Haitians has got worse not better, even after all the promises of aid, the visits from legions of politicians and celebrities, and thousands of US soldiers and United Nations (UN) forces.

This is the latest example of foreign intervention leading to disaster for ordinary Haitians. There is deep anger and bitterness among the population.

Expectations heading into Haiti's elections on November 28 were modest at best. The country's notoriously opaque Conseil Électoral Provisoire (CEP) once again excluded the country's most influential political party, Fanmi Lavalas, from participating in elections, as well as a number of other parties and individual candidates. Procedurally, the devastation from January's earthquake and the ongoing cholera epidemic seriously complicated efforts to register voters and establish an adequate number of polling stations. While many in Haiti and abroad had held out hope that it would still be possible for the election to proceed in an orderly and peaceful manner, such expectations were unfortunately dashed by widespread reports of voter confusion, violence, and fraud.

Reactions to the elections varied: some groups claimed that the balloting was valid despite reports of irregularities, while others decried the entire process as fraudulent and illegitimate. International observation groups were faced with several undesirable alternatives as they assessed the elections, and their official conclusion turned out to be a highly controversial compromise between practical and ethical concerns.

On November 28, first round legislative and presidential elections will be held. As a previous article explained, democracy will be absent because the nation's most popular party, Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas, and 14 others are excluded, the system rigged to install Washington's favorites.

In a September 8, Miami Herald op-ed, Ira Kurzban, an immigration and employment law expert as well as Aristide's former legal counsel headlined, "Unfair and undemocratic," saying:

"Imagine if (America's) Federal Election Commission disqualified the Democratic and Republican parties from the 2012 presidential election and declared that only candidates of minor parties could run."

"Yet (Haiti's November 28 elections) are just that - unfair, unconstitutional and undemocratic."

After prolonging his failed campaign for a month after Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) ruled him ineligible to run for the presidency, Wyclef Jean has finally dropped his appeal, officially terminating his presidential bid on September 21st. Jean’s recent involvement in Haitian politics was a source of controversy from the outset; many had cast him as an unqualified meddler, while others embraced his now defunct candidacy as a move to empower the youth and deepen democracy.

Jean’s decision to run for the presidency was greeted with optimism and hope by much of Haiti’s politically discontented populace. However, there were early signs that Jean was not the progressive candidate he initially professed to be. In an interview with MTV published on February 25, 2004, Jean had expressed support for the coup that ousted democratically-elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In reference to the militants who overthrew the former president, Jean said, “I don’t consider those people rebels. It’s people standing up for their rights. It’s not like these people just appeared out of nowhere and said, ‘Let’s cause some trouble.’ I think it’s just built up frustration, anger, hunger, depression.” Jean originally made these comments to MTV right as the events began to unfold in Haiti, before the involvement of the United States and other international powers had come to light. Therefore, Jean may have been able to excuse his politically improvident comments on the grounds of ignorance, but he removed any doubt about his political stance when he produced the 2006 documentary, The Ghosts of Cité Soleil. While the film received generally positive reviews, Jean’s depiction of the 2004 coup was historically inaccurate and politically biased. In the film, Jean paints sweatshop owners and neo-Duvalierists in a positive light, while implying that Aristide stepped down of his own free will.

The Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) works with grassroots groups there, in America, and the Haitian Diaspora, developing effective human rights advocacy for some of the world's most oppressed, impoverished, and long-suffering people, over 500 years and counting.

In late July, it issued a new report titled, "Our Bodies Are Still Trembling: Haitian Women's Fight Against Rape," a problem Amnesty International (AI) highlighted in March saying:

"Sexual violence is widely present in the camps where some of Haiti's most vulnerable live. It was already a major concern (pre-quake), but the situation in which displaced people are living exposes women and girls to even greater risks," the issue IJDH examined in its report, explaining that Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps "exacerbated the already grave problem of sexual violence," two US lawyer delegations and a women's health specialist investigating the problem firsthand in May and June, interviewing over 50 rape or attempted rape survivors.

Amid the hoopla over Chelsea Clinton’s wedding at a posh estate north of New York City, there were plenty of toasts in the media to Bill Clinton and the good works he’s performed since leaving the White House.

In particular, Clinton’s role in working with Haiti, both before and after the catastrophic earthquake last January, was singled out.

To the U.S. media, Clinton is a compassionate statesmen, with only the best interests of the Haitian people at heart. Particularly since this year’s quake, he has been viewed as a decisive leader who can “get things done,” in contrast to the country’s ineffective government. Because of his role as co-chair of the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission (IHRC), Esquire magazine called Clinton “CEO of a leaderless nation,” the Miami Herald repeatedly refers to him as the “czar of the recovery effort.”

Over 15 weeks post-quake, Haiti’s imperial takeover is proceeding. It began straightaway after the calamity, Haitians victimized by denied aid, appalling repression, and now dispossession of their land, homes, and communities. More on that below.

On April 16, the New York Times carried Reuters and AP reports stating Haiti’s parliament approved the participation of foreign investors to rebuild the country, meaning, of course, seize, occupy, own, control, and colonize it for profit, using Haitians as exploited serfs.

AP stated: ”Haiti’s soon-to-expire parliament has approved the creation of (an Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission – IHRC) co-chaired by former US President Bill Clinton to oversee billions in post-quake reconstruction aid, the Ministry of Communications said Friday (April 16).”

The vote also extended Haiti’s state of emergency for 18 months, leaving the Rene Preval-Jean-Max Bellerive government in charge, effectively a dictatorship like Preval instituted in 1999 by not renewing parliament and ruling by decree pending new elections.

For decades, Noam Chomsky has been an analyst and activist working in support of the Haitian people. In addition to his revolutionary linguistics career at MIT, he has written, lectured and protested against injustice for 40 years. He is co-author, along with Paul Farmer and Amy Goodman of Getting Haiti Right This Time: The U.S. and the Coup. His analysis "The Tragedy of Haiti" from his 1993 book Year 501: The Conquest Continues is available for free online. This interview was conducted in late February 2010 by phone and email. The interviewer thanks Peter Hallward for his kind assistance.

Distinguished historian, scholar and activist Gabriel Kolko studied "the nature and purpose of (American) power (since) the 1870s," calling it "violen(t), racis(t), repressi(ve) at home and abroad (and) cultural(ly) mendaci(ous)." It's been the same since inception, historian Howard Zinn calling colonial America:

"a class society from the beginning. America started off as a society of rich and poor, people with enormous grants of land and people with no land. And there were riots, there were bread riots in Boston, and riots and rebellions all over the colonies, of poor against rich, of tenants breaking into jails to release people who were in prison for nonpayment of debt. There was class conflict. We try to" portray a benevolent nation. We weren't then. We're not now.